In Herald online comments, reader Dustycc53 remarked: “Wasted on a war criminal. Hey Dick how many kids did your lies kill? Thats ok, hell can wait a little longer.” A website joked Cheney’s operation failed because “surgeons mistakenly transplanted the bleeding heart of a liberal” into the unflinchingly hawkish veep.

“Damn. No more jokes about Cheney not having a pulse,” tweeted liberal blogger Dan Kennedy, a Northeastern University assistant professor. “Cheney’s only remaining medical problem is no reflection when he looks in the mirror.” He added defensively later, “Hey, it’s a great day for the Cheneys. Why shouldn’t we have some fun?”

While Bush derangement syndrome raged throughout his presidency, it never held a candle to the hatred for the vice president. Whence all of the vicious vitriol?

University of Virginia psychology professor Jonathan Haidt has been doing some interesting research on what makes “liberals” (that is to say, Leftists, since they’re not really liberal at all) and conservatives tick and recently wrote a book on the topic. It explains a remarkable amount about current (and not-so-current) events. It is all the more interesting because he seems to be a recovering “liberal” himself. Here’s the deal, from the New York Times book review:

Anecdotally, he reports that when he talks about authority, loyalty and sanctity, many people in the [liberal] audience spurn these ideas as the seeds of racism, sexism and homophobia. And in a survey of 2,000 Americans, Haidt found that self-described liberals, especially those who called themselves “very liberal,” were worse at predicting the moral judgments of moderates and conservatives than moderates and conservatives were at predicting the moral judgments of liberals. Liberals don’t understand conservative values. And they can’t recognize this failing, because they’re so convinced of their rationality, open-mindedness and enlightenment.

A recent issue of Reason magazine for which he was the cover child (literally, in a sense) elaborates. The work is based on research in which he asked value-loaded questions of two thousand self-described liberals and conservatives. A third were asked to answer in their own opinions, a third were asked to answer with what they imagined would be “typical liberal” opinions, and the remaining were asked to answer with what they thought a “typical conservative” would think:

This design allowed us to examine the stereotypes that each side held about the other. More important, it allowed us to assess how accurate they were by comparing peoples’ expectations about “typical” partisans to the actual responses from partisans on the left and right. Who was best able to pretend to be the other?

The results were clear and consistent. Moderates and conservatives were most accurate in their predictions, whether they were pretending to be liberals or conservatives. Liberals were least accurate, especially those who described themselves as “very liberal.” The biggest errors in the study came when liberals answer care and fairness questions while pretending to be conservatives. When faced with statements such as “one of the worst things one can do is to hurt a defenseless animal” or “justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree. If you have a moral matrix built primarily on intuitions about care and fairness (as equality) and you listen to the Reagan narrative, what else could you think? Reagan seems completely unconcerned about the welfare of drug addicts, poor people and gay people. He is more interested in fighting wars and telling people how to run their sex lives.

Clearly, the Left views Cheney through the same Alice-in-Evil-Land mirror, to the point that they don’t believe that he deserves to live. Haidt elaborates:

If you don’t see that Reagan is pursuing positive values of loyalty, authority and sanctity, you almost have to conclude that Republicans see no positive value in care and fairness. You might even go so far as Michael Feingold, theater critic for The Village Voice, when he wrote in 2004, “Republicans don’t believe in the imagination, partly because so few of them have one, but mostly because it gets in the way of their chosen work, which is to destroy the human race and the plan…Which is why I personally think they should be exterminated before they cause any more harm.” One of the [many] ironies in this quotation is that is shows the inability of a theater critic -– who skillfully enters fantastical imaginary worlds for a living — to imagine that Republicans operate within a moral matrix that differs from his own.

Again, emphasis mine. Note the Leftist eliminationist rhetoric from the people who deign to lecture us, the great unwashed, about civility. Another irony is that he is no doubt hyperconfident of his ability to see into the hearts of conservative darkness, which is really just an example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect, described as “…a cognitive bias in which the unskilled suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes”:

The hypothesized phenomenon was tested in a series of experiments performed by Justin Kruger and David Dunning, both then of Cornell University.[2][5] Kruger and Dunning noted earlier studies suggesting that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.

Kruger and Dunning proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will:

tend to overestimate their own level of skill;

fail to recognize genuine skill in others;

fail to recognize the extremity of their inadequacy;

recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skill, if they can be trained to substantially improve.

One of the more amusing and obvious effects of this is seen in writing, especially in Hollywood, where conservative writers can write fully developed liberal characters (and most have to if they want to keep working), whereas liberal writers’ attempts at writing a conservative character invariably produce a laughably bad, two-dimensional caricature. Conservatives and liberals then watch two different movies. The liberals think the conservative characters are spot on, while conservatives instantly recognize that they’re watching yet another amateur attempt by an idiot liberal writer who doesn’t have the vaguest idea how a conservative thinks.

As one more data point, the phenomenon was on full display in the recent controversy over the Heartland document on teaching science, in which many of the Leftist warm mongers continue to fantasize that the faked Heartland document is real. On the other hand, it was almost immediately obvious to those on the other side, even those sympathetic to the AGW thesis, such as (libertarian) Megan McArdle, that it was faked, because no conservative would have written such a thing in such a way. As she noted, it read like “it was written from the secret villain lair in a Batman comic. By an intern.”

Peter Gleick wrote it that way, and his partners in fraud thought it perfectly plausible, exactly because they fundamentally lack this ability to understand the motivations of their political opponents. And by Haidt’s thesis, they are, by the nature of their belief system, unable to rectify this problem. So perhaps the rest of us should take note, take heart, and most importantly in the coming months, take advantage.

Rand Simberg is a recovering aerospace engineer and a consultant in space commercialization, space tourism and Internet security. He offers occasionally biting commentary about infinity and beyond at his weblog, Transterrestrial Musings.

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1.
Mike

This reminds me of a somewhat related article written by Zombie last year, concerning leftist moral relativism and lack of intrinsic human values.

Zombie doesn’t update his(?) example to today. The leftist alcoholic doesn’t just admit he’s a drunk, he goes to grade schools and passes out airplane bottles of Jim Beam to the kids, telling them a quart of booze a day is cool, and socially just, and helps stop Global Warming. This guy writes a screenplay revising “The Lost Weekend” into a Adam Sandler yuck-fest. He lobbies Congress to abolish age-restrictions on alcohol sales. Leftists are never just amoral. They (ACLU) are working 24/7 to destroy any system of morality anywhere close to normal human behavior (check out a Leftist’s reaction to the mere mention of ‘normality’).

This article fails to distinguish what right-wing hatemongers say they believe and what they really do believe. Since progressives have the intelligence to see through lies and propaganda, we know it’s impossible to take the word of right-wingers at face value. If you asked Cheney why we invaded Iraq, he would never admit the real reasons were to steal oil fields to give to Texaco and help his Haliburton buddies get rich, but everybody who isn’t a moron knows that is what the truth is.

The same applies to the Heartland Institute’s internal documents. I think the documents are real and the oddities within them the article discusses only shows how good apologists for the oil industry really are. They place those things in all of their memos so they will have plausible deniability if they get out. They really do think like Batman villains in lairs. That is what Dick Cheney’s house is really like.

Wow Throbbin! Are you actually serious? If so, you could be the poster child for exactly what this article talks about. You’re clueless to what a conservative actually believes and thinks. What a perfect example. LOL

Yes, and what’s the point in attempting to change a closed mind? It’s the only game many know, so it’ll take a while for the penny to drop: the time for chatter is over. Leftists en masse are arrogant, ignorant, smug and, often, stupid. Time to get them out of the way for good. Are we supposed to sit passively waiting for Obama’s Final Solution? We are nothing if not a pragmatic people; the method actually chosen to restore constitutional government is relatively unimportant. The result is the thing. By every rational measure, the left loses and goes down hard. Why compromise?

Yeah, this is satire. He got me on another post but I got the joke here. He’s good. He probably isn’t in Hollywood at this level of skill but probably in the engineering department of a university laughing at the people in the social pseudo-sciences.

What I find — as recently as yesterday with my brother — is that when I confront the incorrectness of any of his (Leftist) specific contentions his response is to ignore my factual observations and either meander onto another subject or as he did once again yesterday, get up and leave the lunch table.

All right Mr. Simberg, your article is done -30-, you know. Trying to make your article longer by pretending to be a poster is unbecoming to you. At least you could pick a better nom de plume than Throbbin Yobbin. Silly…

Remember things did not go exactly to the oil industries’ plan because Bush is very stupid. If he had brains he would have been just like Hitler.

However, getting the Chinese in there helps Texaco’s plan to continue gouging Americans at the gas pump. If the oil goes to China, Texaco will have no competition from Iraqi oil companies and can continue toi poison the earth at their current profit margin.

Hey Throbbin, you should re-read the article and immediately afterward review your post. It’ll be the literary equivalent of looking into the mirror. If you do as I suggest, and still cannot recognize the irony, you are Darth Vader.

I don’t think Megan McCardle is even remotely libertarian. Maybe in the same sense that Bill Mahrer is, which is basically not at all. Otherwise she’d be writing at Reason, not Atlantic, which is essentially a high brow liberal (not libertarian) magazine.

I can’t even read Instapundit when she guest blogs. He’s too hawkish to be a classic libertarian, but at least he’s in the area. She’s not even that.

For instance, recently on a message board dedicated to video games, there is a thread about Kickstarter, which is a crowdfunding site – basically someone puts up a pitch for a game, and people decide whether or not they want to help fund it for money.

Anyway, one of the games on the site happens to be a very simple game about Ron Paul. Basically a flash game except it’s written in HTML5. It’s gotten like $10,000 in pledges.

A video game news site had an “expose” about the game that revealed the guy used some source code from a tutorial to make it. This set some guy off in the thread on the video game site ranting about the “dangerous ideology” of libertarians (basically that the government shouldn’t regulate things like Kickstarter), and he hoped it would teach them a lesson. He went on and on and on.

Yes – everything IS political to them and they are inexhaustible in their outrage over every little thing. That is how they have chipped away at so much. They just wear the oppostition down (FINE! Here! Take it! Just SHUT!UP!).

By Jove I think you’ve hit it right on the head. Liberals are perpetual whining teenagers trying to force life to be “fair”, or at least their personal version of fair, which really isn’t fair at all, it only favors them. They were left out of things in school, not picked for teams, teased, etc… Now they are “getting even” and truly believe if we just have enough laws and regulations they can force life to be fair. Everytime that has been tried in society it has resulted in mass murder.

It always seemed to me that the ideology of the left was being promoted by the baby boomer 60′s radicals who mentally stayed in the 60′s, never grew up or learned how to play well with others, and who could not take no for an answer….

The radicalism was there and waiting in the colleges when the ‘Boomers arrived there beginning in ’64 – ’65, the first years ANY ‘Boomers were old enough for college. A bunch of 18 year old freshmen didn’t organize the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, which began in September of ’64. The only places any ‘Boomers could even vote in ’64 were Georgia and Kentucky, both of which allowed 18 year olds to vote. The first elections in which any significant numbers of ‘Boomers could vote were ’68 and ’72, both of which Nixon won and his resounding win in ’72 was against the radical’s candidate.

What did happen was that because the colleges were already heavily communist influenced, many ‘Boomers were radicalized for a time. No doubt the major motivator for that radicalization was the Draft. The War in Vietnam had significant popular support until the Tet Offensive in ’68, from which the war became increasingly unpopular. Opposition reached a fever pitch actually in the early ’70s, and especially so with the threat to eliminate the student deferral for graduate students. It is worthy of note that virtually the whole “counter-culture” and student activism ended with the end of the draft. The radical leftists then turned to the environment as their organizing principle.

Those of us who left college in the early ’70s ran into the buzz saw of Nixon’s price controls, spiraling inflation, and all the unrest associated with Watergate. That was followed by Carter’s “stagflation” and home mortgage rates nearing 20% at the time many ‘Boomers were starting families. The vast majority of ‘Boomers were quickly mugged by reality and put away the stupid ideas popular when they were smoking dope in a college dorm. But, the ones who stayed in school to keep their draft deferment or for the women experimented with lesbianism and went into “Womens Studies” for your PhD went on to become the heads of universities and are the tenured professors today. If you stayed in academia or went straight to work in government or leftist interest groups such as unions, the environmental groups, various non-profits, or went into media/journalism or entertainment, you could live out your days with the same stupid ideas you had smoking dope in a college dorm in ’69. Also if you stayed in those fields, you never had any contact with people who didn’t also have the same stupid ideas smoking dope in a college dorm in ’69, so you think everybody has those same ideas.

I think that by characterizing them as 15 years old, you’re giving them far too much credit. Most 15 year olds have sum of the mush in their skulls ordered and are capable of flashes of restraint and ordered thinking. Most lefties I’ve dealt with are simply children; no impulse control, no ablility to analyze a situation and come up with a plan. They are simply programmed by feckless parents and the government schools and from there on in life, they simply react.

In almost twenty years of dealing with one of the largest public employee unions in the Country, I never saw them adequately prepared for contract negotiations, a grievance arbitration, or a labor board hearing. Their people are intelligent in the sense that their synapses fire quickly, but they are so programmed and so convinced of their essential superiority and the rightness of their cause that they never work through what the outher guy might do. Most of the time they never even prepped their witnesses for arbitrations or board hearings, so cross of union witnesses was usually very fertile ground. In true Alinsky style, they always sought to provoke an emotional reaction or preferably over-reaction from their opposition and when they didn’t get the expected reaction, they had no plan B. All of which just goes to provide a real life example of the author’s premise here.

Recently watched a film called the Double with Richard Gere.
Found this review over at the examiner by Fiore Mastracci
The problem with most espionage thrillers is their penchant to swirl political commentary into the story. Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, screenwriters for THE DOUBLE fall into the typical Hollywood mind set from the get-go. In an opening scene, in order to establish Capitalism as an evil, a debate between two senators has the Republican senator arguing for peace and cooperation with Russia to protect his business investments in that country, while the Democratic senator is urging America to stand guard, because Russia is back to its Cold War ways and is our enemy, worthy of increasing defense spending. Say what? Only in the sordid mind of a loony liberal would a Democrat be screaming for increased defense spending and raising our guard against the aggressive maneuvers of another country. These are the same folks who can’t recognize our current enemies and are under the delusion we can achieve peace by dialogue with a religion that wants us eliminated from the planet. Brandt and Haas, with WANTED and the remake of 3:10 TO YUMA under their belts, should not have felt compelled to acquiesce to Hollywood’s left wing pressures. This film was already going an independent distribution route.
Mr Sindberg, you should contact Mr Mastracci and forward your article.

“Note the Leftist eliminationist rhetoric from the people who deign to lecture us, the great unwashed, about civility.”

Civility. Yes, Obama is always lecturing us about “civility.” Yet he and his minions are the least civil people on this planet. They will tolerate anything but anybody who disagrees with them. Because if you do disagree with the far left, you need to be crushed and destroyed. Just look at what they tried to do to the Tea Parties. I will never, EVER, forget the assault made by degenerates like Pelosi and Reid on the Tea Parties when they first became popular. Astroturf, Nazis, un-American, were just a few of the insults hurled at the Tea Parties. And why? Because the Tea Parties represented a threat to their power. And power is everything to the far left. Forget about this “good for the country” crap. The far left is all about power, holding on to power, and making sure that YOU follow that power until your dying day. And with Obamacare, that literally would be your dying day. The far left are the lowest form of life there is, simply because they are not interested in competing on the field of ideas. Because, if you disagree with them, you need to be silenced (as with the “Fairness Doctrine”) or crushed (like the Tea Parties).

Well, the Tea Parties are still here and if you think they’re going away, just wait until November. It is our mission in life to crush Obama and chase all of these socialists out of Washington. Not since Jimmy Carter has the country seen up close what a disaster having a far left president can be. I think the nation will wake up in November and do the right thing by throwing Obama out of office.

You are right that the Tea Partiers are still here and I believe gaining momentum despite the MSM’s lies.

I’m reminded of someone’s comment after Obama confessed himself unaware of the first Tea Parties across the nation. Coupled with his not hearing Irreverent Wright’s fiery racist sermons, this commenter said he didn’t know if Obama was aware enough of his surroundings to be smart enough to be President.

We don’t think we’re sticking our neck out too far to say that there is a landslide in its development stages fomenting in the electorate.

The Facecrook crowd is only showing up to Obama’s rallies in around the fifty percentile as compared to 2008.

The female population will vote their pocketbook in large numbers.

The big fat middle ground electorate will lean right this election.

The problem remains to find enough votes to get a majority of republicans into the senate, as well as, TEA Party senators into the senate.

The next problem is, the deficit and fiat money supplies.

I’m afraid the globalist community might have generated enough momentum in terms of America’s fiscal trajectory into a total collapse within five years, nullifying everything we’re trying to accomplish.

The proverbial “frog in boiling water” woke up too late to jump from the pot.

All we’re doing at this point is arguing over scraps left on the table.

The best we can hope for is to keep arguing our points, while keeping a vigilant eye on preparing for the double digit inflation about to ensue.

As for the liberals, progressives, whatever…perhaps they will have won. As for what’s left of us and the USA? We will be outraged, and them? They’re too stupid and immoral for true liberty, they’ll be happier than pigs in a sty. Unfortunately for all of us, them included, America will be a long forgotten concept left on the ash heap of history because we became too complacent and woke up too late.

I also think a big part of this caricaturing comes from a need for continual validation of their thoughts … a “you can’t fool me, I’ve “gotcha” number … I k-n-o-w! If you’re bad, that proves I’m good.” And they want it proved over, and over, and over ….. and there’s a mix of harsh anger in there as well — to punish (humiliate) the “bad.”

When faced with statements such as “one of the worst things one can do is to hurt a defenseless animal” or “justice is the most important requirement for a society,” liberals assumed that conservatives would disagree.

Of course one has to be careful with definitions. A liberal would define “hurt a defenseless animal” as harming it in any way. A conservative, likely as not – especially one that hunts, will define “hurt” as “letting it suffer”, i.e. letting a wounded animal escape and not killing it properly. Likewise, a liberal would probably define “justice” in the “social justice” context, taking into account such things as historical wage inequality, past slavery, and the like whereas a conservative will define it as equal treatment under the law and leave it at that.

Assymmetry? Don’t you think you’re being kind? How about unflinching ‘doublethink,’ hypocrisy, and delusion not to mention old-fashioned ignorance and studipity? The Dem Party is practically a racial suicide cult devoted to stupidity.

The critical aspect of this from a political standpoint is this: You cannot have a productive exchange with someone who has disqualified you morally.

All the talk about the loss of “civility” in contemporary discourse reduces to this. As I once had a character say:

“What else does a charge of ‘moral absolutism’ mean? It means ‘this room ain’t big enough for both our moral positions.’ And suppose that’s true? What’s left then, but to fight to the death with sabers?”

Conservatives should keep that in mind — not merely because it assists in recognizing when a liberal cannot be persuaded, but also because should we ever fall into the same trap, we won’t be willing to recognize and correct our own mistakes. And we will make mistakes. Haven’t we made them in the past?

There was a Canadian political program many years ago where they had a “backwards” day. The conservatives on the program (Andrew Coyne was one) had to act like progressives, and vice versa. The conservatives did an excellent job and were even quite persuasive, but the progressives were hopeless. The best they could come up with was a bad imitation of a psychopathic criminal, which I suppose was their image of conservatives.

Conservatives understand the liberal mind because we are assaulted by liberalism day-in and day-out. We live and skillfully survive in a world dominated by liberalism in the media, our government, and in our schools. Because of our nature, we, too often, remain silent as the liberal at the office water cooler or the liberals among fellow diners at lunch pontificate about their opinions and the opinions of the media. They blather on thinking that they are surrounded by those in complete agreement.

Is it any wonder that conservatives have a better understanding of liberals and liberalism than liberals have of conservatives and conservatism?

Subversion techniques are about the only way to enter these closed minds with any effect. Of course, I am ignoring Providential openings which come about to the grace of one party or the other or of G-d’s needs at the time. Providence’s openings are welcome and may be the better, but they have no schedule we know, nor would they should they be counted on, because Our G-d wants we descendants of Adam to toil for our blessings.

Samson and David both employed subversion techniques. Samson with his riddles and by his adept provoking of discords between Philistine groups. They mean mixing it up, and at times becoming an ally of your enemy — all to the point of gaining in the great philosophical battle for Peace, Justice, Benevolence and Liberty.

Getting the other side to question their own assumptions is a basic subversion technique. For example “Is it really a good thing to support single mothers?” Especially in timely topical matters where one can ask a question in a way that does not cause a hardening counter-action.

It seems to me that Conservatives understand liberals better than vice versa for 2 reasons. One is that we are constantly bombarded by liberal ideas from the msm all the time whereas liberals only hear conservative values as filtered (and distorted) through said msm.

The other, and perhaps more important is that many conservatives were once immature, rebelious… liberals. Conservatives understand liberals the same way adults understand children. And for the same reason, liberals will never be able to understand conservatives for the same reason that children do not understand adults. They just see them as big meanies who never want to have fun and just want to punish people.

As I was reading this article, I found myself mentally composing a response, using the Peter Gleick incident as an affirmation. As I read further, lo and behold, there it was, all spelled out for me. Nicely done!

The linked article (The Heartland Affair: A Climate Champion Cheats — and We All Lose By Bryan Walsh Wednesday, Feb. 22, 2012, Time.com>Science) about the Gleick incident has what I hold to be the nut paragraph as:

If anything, the Heartland memos — which are now hard to judge because we can’t be sure exactly what’s real — indicate that fossil-fuel companies don’t seem to be spending that much money on climate denial, at least with this group. Exxon stopped donating in 2006 — it had given $675,000 before that — while the archconservative Koch Foundation gave just $25,000 in 2011, all of it earmarked for health care research.

Gleick engaged in some deceptions in gathering information to verify an anonymous memo he obtained. Up to a point such deceptions are a legitimate means of verifying claims of legally or morally questionable actions by an entity, for self-protection, for gaining competitive market information. Using a false name is within the normal range, even a carefully worded suggestion that one is someone else — say Eric Holder — is legitimate, as the young investigative journalist O’Keefe recently demonstrated in superb fashion.

Falsifying memos and documents in order to defame or harm a person or organization is illegal and immoral. An they harm like a toxic fog. As the paragraph from the Time Science article shows — who knows which Heartland document is legit and which a fraud?

Like the toxic green-yellow fog the Germans dispersed over the Allied trench lines in WWI tended to blow back upon the German’s own lines, the fog of document fraud can harm its vile creator. Dan Rather withered in the blowback, so too are the liberals withering in the blowbacks of their own fogs of vile delusions about conservatives and Republicans.

We conservatives have developed defenses and stronger immune systems while the liberals have been weakening their own in their social bubbles.

We can sense what is real and what is a fog because we have not been permitted to entertain delusions that our ideals are right “just because”. We have to fight to defend them, fight to hold on to them, and even fight to rediscover them. We are strong, they are weak. String in spirit, strong in intellect. We had best keep our individual moralities strong too — our bent to fierce individualism means our moral fiber is only strong if we each individually are strong.

Our strength today has been gained by perseverance in long battle against superior forces. The forces we fight are no longer superior. Yet the fog of delusions still permeate the culture and will do so for at least another generation if not two.

We will win long term only when our individual “points of light” are kept on and in public. These are the “social conservative” lights, they are morals and adherences to G-dly moral law.

If not, we too will get lost in the fog as our strength suffers for lack of a strong foe. Without restoration of and strengthening of cultural and national morality, our victory over Liberalism will be as short as the Allies victory over the Kaiser on 11/11/1918. Without moral and spiritual restoration and development we run the risk of a greater evil rising out of the hot ashes of the Liberal and Socialist establishment. Don’t risk a cheap and short victory, or our grandchildren and their children will suffer a person worse than Obama and all the oppressors of the liberal and RINO establishment class.

Recall the “Mirror, Mirror” episode of Star Trek, where Kirk, McCoy, and Uhuru transport into the evil universe? Afterwards, Spock notes, “It was far easier for you as civilized man to act as barbarians, than for them as barbarians to act like civilized men.”

Why don’t any of you look further. The Left is clearly the heir to the Inquisition, Holy Office if you prefer. The claim atheism of course but have actually turned back the clock to the days of yesteryear.

They are truly the spawn of all the hateful revealed religions that have shed so much blood. For origins go back to Zarathusa (Zoroaster). The world is rule by good and evil so pick your side and never look back. Marx is really the modern flowering of these beliefs.

Let’s be like Roger Williams and get religion out of the public sphere, including the Left’s version.

I’m glad you mentioned Peter Gleick. He’s such a maroon, that he helps weigh down a number of other climate lefties, greenies, and scientits who’re valiantly trying to defend and apologize for his crimes and hubris.

Perhaps another reason why conservatives are better at understanding the liberal mindset is because many conservatives were liberal when younger. As the maturation process progressed most finally discovered how childish and destructive the leftist pablum really is, something liberals have yet to discover or are unable to reconcile. Hmmm, it leads me to believe that liberalism could be the result of a disruption in the maturation process leaving one mentally and emotionally stunted.

Perhaps one reason that conservatives are better able to understand the liberal mindset and overcome the foils of cognitive dissonance is because many conservatives were liberal as youngsters. As the maturation process progressed we realized how both childish and destructive the leftist ideology actually is. Hmmm, could it be that liberalism is the result of a disconnect or mutation in the process of maturation, leaving the victims of liberalism mentally and emotionally stunted?

Liberals are jealous of the cream of the crop, smart, hard working men and women who depend only on themselves and are confident in making their own decisions. With the courage of their corruption, libs seek to destroy those with the courage of their convictions.

“It is all the more interesting because he seems to be a recovering “liberal” himself.”

There’s a lot of truth behind the analogies of “liberalism” (which is an American misnomer of Statism) and alcoholism. Both are attempts to escape reality, and both lead to greater disappointment in the end.

My ultraliberal coworker was horrified to learn I was armed in my office. I explained to him that even though he and I do not always get along, I would never hurt him because I actually care about him despite his wrongheaded misguided politics, because he is part of my work family. Not only would I never hurt him, I would kill to defend him or his family.

I think he was shocked to learn I think about him that way.

Liberal thinks “man with gun is dangerous.” Conservative thinks, “someone has to protect these weak people around me.”

“…the Dunning-Kruger Effect, described as ‘…a cognitive bias in which the unskilled suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.’”

This is MARVELOUS. I wish I’d known there was a name for this while working toward my latest (2nd) graduate degree; I could have used it as a reference at least half a dozen times, probably more. Oh well. But who knows when I’ll need this useful concept again, so my next stop, after I hit send on this comment, is researching it

Okay we know our enemy, Sun Tzu would be proud. Now what are we going to do about them? I am tired of the analysis. Why are writers so averse to writing about what we are going to do to take back America? Hell progressives proudly tell us what they are going to do to America: recent video of EPA czar…NBP…

Maybe the left is on to something: We keep analyzing them and they keep working toward destroying America. So for fri$$ing sake, let’s start doing to them what they have done to us for 60 70 years.

“Kruger and Dunning noted earlier studies suggesting that ignorance of standards of performance is behind a great deal of incompetence. This pattern was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, operating a motor vehicle, and playing chess or tennis.”

This explains to a tee what is wrong with our public education system today. Having been taken over by liberals who cannot recognize the necessity of standards, our children are taught that all are equal regardless of ability and effort. What it does NOT explain is why we conservatives allowed this to happen!!

Liberals are not interested in knowing what conservatives think because they “know” that conservatives are fundamentally evil. Since they know this any evil thought must have its origin in conservatism and if a conservative says something, it must be evil or from evil motives.

Conversely, if it is a liberal saying something or holding a postition it is a fundamentally good thing.

Therefore, a liberal will defend a scumbag like Bill Maher because he is a liberal, and so, fundamentally good. Rush Limbaugh is the devil incarnate, first and formost, because he is conservative, and anything he says must be evil. As long as a liberal never examines this basic premise, he will remain liberal and never even imagine that the other side has any redeeming qualities or anything to offer the discussion. Sometimes an event will happen such as 9/11 which will illuminate both sides of the issues and a liberal will see that his basic presumption of good and evil is, perhaps, a little one-sided and they start to see the “other side” in a different light.

In the last year or so, based on how things are going in this current administration, I have seen a few rubes self-identify, so to speak. The far leftys are hardening their postions but the people who have been left because it is the kind caring thing to be, are starting to catch on. So maybe there is hope.

1. All outcome for an individual or nation can be no better or worse than any other.
2. If an outcome is found to be better, then they must have cheated.
3. If an outcome is found to be worse, then they must have been victimized.
4. Victims will lash out in direct proportion to the victimization.
5. It is the cheater that is doing the victimizing.

Conservative Thinking:

1. Good behavior leads to a better outcome.
2. Bad behavior leads to a worse outcome.

Notice that the difference in thinking leads to completely opposite results.

Iraq (Pre-war) or Iran behave badly in reaction to the West or Israel (Successful countries). They aren’t bad because the West made them do it.

Concerning the Iraq war, since Iraq wasn’t bad, any invasion plan by the US must have a real reason – oil. It is irrelevant that this is laughable, and has no basis in reality.

Unfortunately, liberal views are catastrophic to themselves and to you. They cannot recognize external dangers until it is too late. Russia and China may only react to the West in a directly proportional manner. Therefore, it is impossible for them to launch a sneak nuclear attack. So the US should lead in unilateral nuclear arms disarmament.

I track emerging risks on my website. I’ve identified modern liberalism as the equivalent of AIDS for the West. Unable to recognize threats properly, it leaves the West in a weakened state so that it is susceptible to defeat from external sources – war. The nuclear arsenal of the US has been gutted so much that the US is now in danger of defeat. Since both Russia and China have effectively threatened nuclear war over an attack on Iran, the US might not be around much longer.

The difference between the two positions is not actually that huge:
Both seem to hold the liberal assumption: Without interference, people will succeed. The difference is just the degree of evidence required to cause one to abandon the assumption in a given case.

For hardcore liberals, the assumption will never be abandoned so all differences in degrees of success must result from interference with those who do not succeed as much. With a very well-defined view of success, that means without interference, everybody would be equivalent. With the good-vs.-evil view that the assumption brings, it is obvious who the “bad guys” are, the ones with whom nobody interferes. Their definition of “success” includes aversion to conflict, so aggression can only be the result of interference. (The aggression by the successful is dismissed as the result of conspiracy by a group small enough that statistical assumptions do not apply, hence all the conspiracy-theories,the “1%”, etc.)

On the other end of the spectrum, there are people who will never accept that outside influences may have disadvantaged people and put them in positions where they could not succeed. Bigotry, the effects of poverty, poor education, poor health, etc. will never be acknowledged. Does this sound familiar (from reality or accusations)?

In the middle there are people who look for evidence and accept things one way or the other. The problem is that the absence of evidence is normally not the evidence of absence. This introduces a slippery slope where a liberal will never stop looking for it, and if you look hard enough, you will find what you seek, whether or not it is really there. Then they dismiss people who take this absence of evidence as cause to look at internal factors for the source of failure, as having not really looked because they “found” evidence.

blotto is right. We have seen into the heart of the enemy and know his plans, so what countermeasures can we take?

Knowing they are essentially blind, it should be quite easy to take action; turning the “dog” meme against President Obama (Romney carried a dog in a crate vs Obama eats a dog) seems to be a great example. Simply focusing on the economy and ignoring attempts to turn the conversation or narrative away from that will probably win the election. We need to overwhelm them in the internet and social media spheres, and use legislative success (i.e. the TEA Party movement sweep of Congress and the State Houses) do defund the Progressives in media, academia and other places they have inserted themselves into the public purse.

An Army of Davids who are self aware and committed to ideals like freedom shoudl be able to overwhelm a blind enemy, no matter how large and seemingly powerful.

I like the cut of your jib. Unfortunately I believe we are in the minority of our party. Much like how the TEA Party has been marginalized by our own side, most on the right are, for some reason, afraid to deal with the left other than writing columns.

I watched Haidt’s TED-talk. I think his results may have been determined by his assumptions. He assumed, for example, that fairness, justice, authority, and loyalty were three separate things at a moral level. Fairness and justice go into earning loyalty. Loyalty is central to reciprocity, a major driver of fairness and justice. This difference, I think, is a matter of understanding their equivalence, not of different moral universes, and that would explain why his “five foundations” of morality take the same value among conservatives while fairness and justice dominate for liberals. Even the other one, sanctity, can be expressed in terms of loyalty to oneself and others.

Essentially, his data actually suggest a different conclusion: Conservatives see fairness and justice as being contingent upon loyalty, connecting the five foundations, while liberals see everyone as having an inalienable right to fairness and what they define as justice. Liberals cannot understand conservatives because they are missing a large part of the picture and do not think in terms of criteria by which one qualifies to be treated how they would treat everyone. For conservatives, it’s very easy to figure out when liberals would seek justice (as they see it) and fairness: They always do.

Haidt is confirming what Ellul explained in his work on propaganda years ago. Much of his research is correct, but it is framed awkwardly in terms of left, liberal, etc. What we term liberal, is in fact progressive. All progressive ideologies, those that require mass participation, require propaganda ipso facto. Propaganda has the effects Haidt identifies. “Liberals” literally have had their thinking regimented by standard neo-Marxist cliches. Abstractions such as social classes are taken as unchallengeable fact. Substituted for reality, these overly reductive, axiomatic, always Manichean cliches can no longer be challenged without serious existential consequences. Nobody likes to learn he’s been brainwashed. Still, to be a liberal is to exhibit the same patterned cliches, tropes, and memes as any Marxist drone. There is no independent liberal; all liberals participate in a mass social group, organization, or movement. Without that group, they cease to be liberal and become something else.

Two examples that leap out at me are fictional conservative talk show hosts, William Shatner’ds radio host character on an episode of “Columbo,” and Henry Winkler’s TV host on the short-lived sitcom “Monty” (5 episodes). Both characters were chronically peeved; Winkler’s character was really a resurrection of Fonzie’s feisty blowhard side. Their fun side never emerges on the air – or in their personal lives.